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Jeff (also an HBS alum) co-teaches the LTV course with Professor Eisenmann about a student of theirs who had written a blog post about sales taking on some of my previous assertions. That student is Erin McCann who formerly worked in sales at Google, so she has some ground to stand on in her assertions.
Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary.
Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the key elements of a competitive advantage for your business have changed as businesses move online, and your domain is instantly global. As a business advisor, I have to recommend even to established companies that they review and revamp their competitive strategy now, even if it appears to be working today.
Most sophisticated investors ignore them, focusing their attention on an entrepreneur's pitch and presentation materials, financial forecast and executive summary. As such, the primary goal of your executive summary is to open the door to an in-person meeting. Entrepreneurs routinely seek my advice regarding their executive summaries.
The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.
It is the bane of every startups existence because it takes up so much time, it is so competitive to sign people and it feels like unproductive time because it’s not moving the ball forward on product, engineering, sales, marketing, biz dev, fund raising. Recruiting. In fact, it’s worse than that. Recruiting is brutal.
Paige is a gifted communicator and my summary does not do him justice. He offers a number of worthwhile tips and tricks that I was not able to capture in the textual summary, so the 14-minute audio file is well worth your time. What follows is a summary which paraphrases Paige’s responses. Click here to listen to the Audio File.
Summary: Send the Deck Pitch decks are sales & marketing decks and like in any sales activity, any great sales person assumes his or her competition will eventually get their deck. Competition isn’t won or lost by your marketing decks?—?it’s it’s won by how you innovate and by how you execute.
You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. An obvious example would be in sales. By going on sales calls you pick up directly the feedback of what customers want and also what they’re telling you about competition.
Many people are too cautious in sales processes and as a result when they present their solutions they end up sounding milquetoast and undifferentiated from anybody else in the market. I recently wrote about the three rules of sales. Assume competition and assume within the buying organization you have enemies. Why Buy Me?
Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. You may have already found several articles, web pages, or books about writing the perfect executive summary.
It’s insanely competitive to get into our industry so most have degrees from institutions like Stanford, Harvard, Wharton and University of Chicago (blatant plug ;-). Of course it is super helpful if a VC can drop you in to important people for business development, recruiting, PR, sales and eventually M&A. Connections?
I wrote the summary notes in this blog post. I talked about this in the TWiVC video but I didn’t do a good enough job of writing it up in the summary notes in the post. And when you finish the demo you can bring in the other important components such as competition, team, customer acquisition strategy, etc. Mobile app?
In short, the VC industry is very sharp-elbowed amongst some very competitive people who are used to winning and most deals don’t have enough space to share investment rounds so people were naturally pretty quick to judge A16Z. Do they win competitive deals? to “Jeez — they sure are hiring a ton of staff. Can that really work?”
We feel pressure to hit milestones for a variety of reasons: Investor presentations, conference demos, customer sales meetings, competitive pressures, a need to drive revenue, business development commitments – whatever. In summary – I have been involved with software development for 25 years.
I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. new features need to go into the sale people’s slides so that they know the latest and greatest about how to differentiate from the competition. In summary. A few people have asked me to try and define the perfect startup organization chart.
Watch the 30-minute interview to hear why but summary notes below. We also spoke about technology systems in the perspective of global competition. The numerator (return) encourages more sales, which is fine. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn’t mind.” ” Who else does Clayton pray for?
The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. Somehow many first-time founders equate “sales” with something that is beneath them. In sales there are also three rules: Qualify, qualify, qualify.
To be clear, I define a product specification as the technical definition of your product, to be used for development and testing purposes, with a quick business summary for context. Call out your top competitors, highlighting your sustainable competitive advantage, including patents, trade secrets. and trademarks.
Or read the quick, informative summary below the image! Here’s a summary of our interview. o Everything is for sale but it’s the price that moves the timing. o Put a timeframe/money – competition in the picture. Matt is one of the most transparent, focused & honest startup guys you’ll meet.
Here is a summary of their key observations, with our joint specifics on what to expect, and how to overcome these obstacles: Customers don’t buy what they don’t know and understand. Multiple decision makers required to close a sale. Initial hype can generate a sales spurt, but long-term growth requires a clear fit.
File this under both Startup Adivce and Sales & Marketing Advice. Given a choice of your marketing person or talking to you (the founder) there’s no competition. Summary: Journalists are people. Tags: Entrepreneur Advice Sales & Marketing Advice Social Media Start-up Advice Startup Advice. Be respectful.
controlling your psychology ) you no doubt have heard me say that raising capital is a sales & marketing process. This is Sales 101. If you’ve read any of my ongoing series on fund raising from venture capitalist (episode 1?— ?controlling that’s a lot riding on your pitch and the willingness of the sponsoring partner to advocate.
That said, a summary below is available for those who prefer to read the notes version. A very big thank you to Travis Biziorek of Kibin who did the summary notes below. If you value the summary notes please at least check out the Kibin website & see what they do. I love the concept.
Due to competitive markets we ended up with a pretty good term sheet until we needed to raise money in April 2001 and then we got completely screwed. This states how the proceeds from a sale or dissolution of the company will be distributed. It was accept the terms or go into bankruptcy so we took the money.
Being very visible in the startup community, I still get an amazing number of badly written emails, rambling executive summaries, and business plans with one paragraph per chapter. In the competitive realm of business, you only get one chance to make a great first impression. You can’t afford that competitive disadvantage.
Some investors seem to focus wholly on the strengths of the management team, or a sustainable competitive advantage, and in reality these are the core attributes for every funding equation. This is not just sales traction, but a proper balance between resources, product, and customers. A startup must gain balanced traction.
This is not unlike a major biz dev deal you’re trying to sign or a big sales campaign into the VP of a major company. I like to tell entrepreneurs to treat it like a sales campaign. EXACTLY like a sales campaign. It is much easier to follow up by calling the junior staff (again, just as you would in a sales campaign).
Serious investors, on the other hand, look for a professional business plan or summary first, and hardly ever look at the product plan. It allows all members of your team, including marketing, support, and sales, to size and build the business plan processes they need to find customers, deliver, and maintain grow the business.
What follows is a summary which paraphrases Mark’s responses. And then create the audience and deliver the right offer to the shoppers so they get the incentive they need to convert and the site gets the sale and a new customer.”. A big part of our culture is to be competitive and to be at peace with your co-workers, with no politics.
Being very visible in the startup community, I still get an amazing number of badly written emails, rambling executive summaries, and business plans with one paragraph per chapter. In the competitive realm of business, you only get one chance to make a great first impression. You can’t afford that competitive disadvantage.
Serious investors, on the other hand, look for a professional business plan or summary first, and hardly ever look at the product plan. It allows all members of your team, including marketing, support, and sales, to size and build the business plan processes they need to find customers, deliver, and maintain grow the business.
Raising money is a sale and selling requires persistence and follow up. The best sales people never give up and they are politely persistent in finding new ways to get in front of target buyers. It’s the exact same phenomenon in sales when you’re in a competitive RFP and 5 firms are pitching. Be in Person. Use your bench.
The elevator pitch should be the first few paragraphs of your business plan, your executive summary, your investor presentation, and the first page of your web site. Unlike [competition], we [differentiation].” Present a sustainable competitive advantage. A good elevator pitch is not just for an elevator discussion.
It always amazes me how an entrepreneur can define his market opportunity so broadly, and then assess his competition so narrowly in the next breath. Competition and sustainable advantage. List and describe your competition, direct and indirect, including customer alternatives. Asserting you have no competition is not credible.
I don’t intend either, Burstly has respectable and strong competition. He’s a natural leader, appropriately competitive, very customer focused and a pleasure to work with. You can also compare how in-app purchases perform vs. cross-promoting the other apps you may have for sale. What does it do?
It always amazes me how an entrepreneur can define his market opportunity so broadly, and then assess his competition so narrowly in the next breath. Competition and sustainable advantage. List and describe your competition, direct and indirect, including customer alternatives. Asserting you have no competition is not credible.
There is no magic formula for a formal business plan format or sequence, but I would recommend the following ten sections, in this sequence, with relevant content: Executive summary Problem and solution Company description Market opportunity Business model Competition analysis Marketing and sales strategy Management team Financial projections Exit (..)
Serious investors, on the other hand, look for a professional business plan or summary first, and hardly ever look at the product plan. It allows all members of your team, including marketing, support, and sales, to size and build the business plan processes they need to find customers, deliver, and maintain grow the business.
Here is a quick summary of the priorities normally covered by the due diligence process: Evaluation of key players. Sales and marketing strategy. An investor will try to get an independent reading on competition, barriers to entry, price sensitivity, and what percentage of the market your company can expect to capture.
I agree with Eric’s summary of the top ten types of pivots to consider: Zoom-in pivot. In sales terminology, the mechanism by which a company delivers it product to customers is called the sales channel or distribution channel. Channel pivots usually require unique pricing, feature, and competitive positioning adjustments.
Being very visible in the startup community, I still get an amazing number of badly written emails, rambling executive summaries, and business plans with one paragraph per chapter. In the competitive realm of business, you only get one chance to make a great first impression. You can’t afford that competitive disadvantage.
Almost instantly, via the Internet or on their smartphone in the store, they can find the lowest price alternative or their favorite features, without waiting for push marketing or listening to your best sales person. Bloom’s classic book, “ The New Experts: Win Today's Newly Empowered Customers.”
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